The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

  The news from North Africa only added to the urgency to do so. On December 1, Kesselring’s reinforced troops skirmished with Anderson’s forward units and drove the British back. Tanks would occupy a central place in the battle for Tunis, and Anderson’s tanks, the American M3 Lee and its modified cousin, the M3 Grant, were obsolete—the main gun was not fitted to a traversing turret, rivets used in construction became lethal projectiles when the tank was hit, and its high profile made it an easy target. They were no match for the German Panzer Mark IV tank and its 75mm gun. A week later, General Dieter von Arnim took command of the Fifth Panzer Army at Tunis, now 25,000 strong, with almost a quarter million Italians and Germans soon to arrive by way of Europe and Rommel’s approaching army. The previous year at Kiev, Arnim’s masterful tank deployments led to the encirclement of an entire Russian army. He intended, after joining forces with Rommel, to annihilate the Americans and British in Tunisia. Within a week of arriving in Tunisia, he went on the offensive.18

  To the relief of Churchill and Brooke, Kesselring could not bring himself to undertake the one operation that would most benefit the Germans in North Africa, which was to rub Malta from the map. A convoy of four British ships reached Malta in late November, leading Brooke to exclaim to his diary, “Thank god. This puts the island safe for a bit.” It put Torch safe for a bit, too, because holding Malta—from where RAF aircraft and Royal Navy submarines could hunt German troop and supply ships—was critical to the success of Torch. Many of the troops Kesselring was shoving into Tunis had been training for the invasion of Malta. Had Kesselring thought like an admiral rather than a Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall, and had those troops been dropped into Malta, a swastika would likely have been flying over Valletta, and Rommel, freely resupplied, would have been driving toward Baghdad rather than away from Benghazi. But Kesselring, like Göring during the Battle of Britain (and now at Stalingrad), had placed his hopes in his pilots and bombers. Crete had claimed many of them, and the Russian front called for more. The leaders of the Reich never truly grasped the significance of Malta: “We should frankly tell the German people that we aren’t interested in conquering Malta,” Goebbels wrote months earlier. “And that’s the truth too.” Now, as the year neared its end, Goebbels confessed to his diary: “Those in the know see quite clearly that Rommel cannot do anything if he doesn’t have gasoline. That is decisive.” The British had understood that for two years; it was why they sent convoy after convoy and dozens of warships on suicidal missions to Malta. Now submarines based at Malta ravaged Rommel’s supply ships, with the result that, Goebbels lamented, “our supplies are, for the most part, lost” and “the situation in French Africa is not exactly rosy.”19

  Nor was it rosy in Russia, where, Goebbels observed with rare understatement, “we are having some trouble about Stalingrad.” He also expressed his feelings on the upcoming Christmas season: “I’ll be glad when this whole Christmas racket is over. One can then devote oneself quietly again to real tasks.” It would not do, he wrote, for the people to “fall too much for the sentimental magic of these festival days.” High on Goebbels’ list of real tasks was the “wiping out of the Jewish race in Europe, and possibly in the entire world.” The Jewish race, Goebbels wrote, “has prepared this war; it is the spiritual originator of the whole misfortune that has overtaken humanity. Jewry must pay for its crime.”20

  In mid-December, in response to claims by the Polish government in exile that two million Polish Jews had been shipped east to their deaths, Anthony Eden addressed the Commons, where he read from an Allied proclamation that condemned “this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” and made a “solemn resolution to ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution.” After Eden spoke, a rare moment of silence was observed in the House, in memory of European Jews. “Bestial,” a word little used in temperate twenty-first-century political speech, appears to reduce the Nazi barbarities to their most elemental and evil. Yet George Orwell later observed that “bestial” was one of the clichés that by overuse in the 1930s and early 1940s had reduced political discourse to blather. Eden’s message went largely unheard outside Britain. The New York Times ran a brief story inside the paper (over the course of the war, the New York Times ran no page-one lead story on the plight of Polish Jews). In Britain, Sikorski’s Free Poles kept the story alive in the British press, which, though having seen its newsprint cut by 20 percent, always made room for the news from Warsaw. Goebbels also recorded his impressions of Eden and the moment of silence: “The English are the Jews among the Aryans” and the Commons “is really a sort of Jewish exchange.” As for Eden: “The perfumed British Foreign Minister… cuts a good figure among those characters from the synagogue…. His entire bearing can be characterized as thoroughly Jewish.”21

  Thirty plays were running in London’s West End in December, twice as many as the year before. Londoners’ infatuation with all things Russian was evidenced by the production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country at the St. James Theatre, where a second box office had to be opened to accommodate the crowds. A Soviet flag flew above Selfridges; inside, the department store’s nearly empty shelves gave the place the feel of Moscow’s Gosudarstvenny Universalny Magazin (GUM). Such was London’s love affair with Russia that the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, was made an honorary member of the Athenaeum, while at the Windmill Theatre, the nude dancers wore Cossack fur hats and red stars in their navels while performing their special ode to Russia, Moscow Nights.

  British patriotism found expression in Noël Coward’s cinematic directorial debut, In Which We Serve. Based on Dickie Mountbatten’s exploits in command of HMS Kelly, which was sunk from under Mountbatten the previous year, the movie, which Coward also produced and starred in, became an instant hit with Britons, although some wits in the Royal Navy dubbed it In Which We Sink. Beaverbrook loathed it, because in an early scene, a copy of his Daily Express with a 1939 headline proclaiming NO WAR THIS YEAR floats on the waves among the wreckage of a doomed ship and the bodies of dead tars. Time called the movie “the first really great picture of World War II.” Coward was also a presence in the West End, where his latest play, Blithe Spirit, a comedic ghost story, had been pulling crowds into the Savoy Theater for a year and a half, and would keep Londoners laughing for the remainder of the war. Coward, along with his old friends King George VI and Winston Churchill, was one of few Britons as popular in the West End as in the East End, though nobody’s popularity topped Churchill’s.22

  On the eve of his birthday, Churchill made his first radio address since May, when he told Britons that conditions would worsen before they got better. Now, with the Allies marching toward Tunis, he used the airwaves to tell Mussolini that Italy would be next to feel Allied wrath: “The fair land of Italy,” he promised, would soon suffer “prolonged, scientific and shattering air attack.” In fact, the previous night, the RAF had bludgeoned Turin’s industrial areas with two-ton bombs. Churchill derided Mussolini as “the hyena” who “broke all bounds of decency” and advised Italians to depose Il Duce (whom Churchill also called “a serf” and “a utensil”) if they wanted to save their “fair land” from further withering attacks. He promised to clear Africa of the enemy “before long.” Of the future course of the war, he offered, “I promise nothing… I know of nothing which justifies the hope that the war will not be long or that bitter, bloody years do not lie ahead.” Britain would fight on, he said, “with a bold heart and a good conscience.” He quoted his favorite Kipling:

  If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

  If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

  If you can meet with Triumph and disaster

  And treat those two imposters just the same.23

  He gave Britons fair warning. El Alamein was a battle won, but not a war won.

  With Christmas coming, the official view held that only the children should receive presents. Yet, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in The New Yorker, “ev
en the children won’t come off so handsomely this Christmas, for toys are scarce, poorly made, and appallingly expensive.” The personal columns of newspapers were full of notices from desperate parents in search of secondhand toys and tricycles and doll carriages. None could any longer be bought new. Those Londoners who planned to gift-wrap a bit of their tea or sugar rations for friends or family found themselves on the wrong side of the law when the Food Ministry announced that it was illegal to give away rations, a decision Churchill lamented as “contrary to logic and good sense” and a blow against “neighborliness and friendship.” The Board of Trade was set to lower Britons’ allotments of clothing coupons from sixty-one to forty per year, which, at about thirteen coupons for a simple dress or man’s suit jacket, limited options in the clothing department. To save material, only three-button single-breasted jackets could be made, with no buttons on the sleeves. Waistcoats were limited to two pockets. Still, the news from the desert made up for food, clothing, and toy shortages. Britons were optimistic, although, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, “several official utterances lately have warned the people that the ramparts they watch are still the White Cliffs of Dover and that an attempt upon them is quite in the cards at some moment when Hitler may believe that popular attention has been diverted elsewhere.”24

  The attention of children playing football in the streets of London’s poorer neighborhoods was focused on the automobiles that regularly appeared, not because the car might break up the game, but because automobiles could be used only for official business, and most East End residents neither owned a car nor had any official business to conduct. When a car turned onto an East End street—or the meaner streets of Manchester, York, Glasgow, Liverpool, or Birmingham—it could mean but one thing. The children stopped their games and watched to see whose house received a visit from uniformed officers bearing terrible tidings from North Africa. Bernard Montgomery’s victory had resulted in a marked increase in such visitations. The official cars cruised the streets of Mayfair, Chelsea, and Knightsbridge, where the upper classes had embraced their duty. “Britain is class ridden,” Pamela Churchill Harriman told a visitor years later, “but it is not class conscious.” The gentry had come in for it along with everyone else; their sons had fought and died in the desert beside East Enders.25

  Pamela remembered that holiday season as being if not the gayest, the least gloomy of the war, in part, she recalled, because of the sense of peace she had attained with the knowledge that her marriage to Randolph was over and, Averell Harriman making a cuckold of Randolph notwithstanding, its end was not her fault, nor was it entirely Randolph’s. “I began gradually to realize that there was a deep difficulty between Clemmie and Randolph, and that in fact Churchill worshipped his son and was trying by every possible means to give him any help or advantage he could.” Churchill lived for his son—“like all Englishmen, the son, or eldest son, is everything”—while Clemmie lived for Churchill, with the result that soon after her marriage, Pamela “sensed this tremendous antagonism… a deep difficulty between Clemmie and Randolph.” Randolph once told her that his mother hated him, and that he had known as much since Clementine went down to Eton and slapped his face in front of the other boys. Pamela, having “come from a normal English family,” thought that claim to be “exaggerated and ridiculous.” Yet, “gradually through the months and years I began to realize there was a certain truth to what he was saying… that this thing of the eldest son was terribly important to Winston and that the only thing that ever came between Winston and Clemmie was Randolph.” Winston, over Clementine’s opposition, would call Randolph’s commanding officers and say, “I would like my son for three days,” and pull Randolph from his military postings in order to accompany Churchill to France, to Cairo, to Tehran. Randolph’s absences from his post resulted in him “catching the flak” from his superiors and Churchill catching it from Clementine, whose only concern was that criticism might be directed at her husband.

  “It’s awfully difficult explaining Clemmie,” Pamela recalled, “because I was really fond of her. She was wonderful to me, but she was a very strange woman. She lived totally for Winston.” As did Randolph, with the result that Pamela, just twenty-one, found herself a spectator to a battle between Randolph and Clementine for Churchill’s love, an unnecessary battle in Pamela’s estimation, because his love for his wife and son was unconditional and total, as it was for Pamela and her small son. “I remember going to the Cabinet Room and telling Winston that we wanted to get a divorce. He was wonderful about it. He said, ‘Never forget, not only are we devoted to you but you are the mother of my grandson.’ ” That was “Little Winston,” with whom Churchill liked to roll on the floors of Chequers: “Winston was much better with small children than Clemmie was,” Pamela recalled. “Clemmie was not good with her grandchildren… she really didn’t have any affinity for the young.”26

  In mid-December, with Rommel retreating toward Tunisia, and the Allied drive for Tunis opposed now by a combination of battle-hardened Germans, desert rains, mud, and high mountain passes, Churchill and Roosevelt began planning for what was supposed to be the first meeting of the Big Three. The time had come to make a final decision on the strategic goals for 1943. Topping the agenda, a means had to be found to defeat the U-boats and take command of the Atlantic. The sea war had to be won before any continental European excursions could be contemplated. And how much naval power to assign to the Pacific war? And what to do with Giraud and de Gaulle? And the vital question, where to go next after clearing North Africa of the Axis.

  Churchill suggested that Iceland or North Africa might prove suitable venues for a conference, but Roosevelt vetoed Iceland on account of “the vile climate” and the likelihood of ice forming on aircraft wings (he had last flown before his first election and did not like to fly in any weather, especially in bad weather). The two leaders settled on North Africa. They invited Stalin, who demurred, claiming quite honestly that his focus was entirely on Stalingrad. Stalin, who was also terrified of flying, replied that he need only be apprised of any decisions taken by Churchill and Roosevelt, wherever they chose to meet. He also advised his allies that they take care to ensure that “no time is being wasted” in fulfilling their promise of opening a second front in Europe in 1943.27

  They settled on Casablanca in the newly liberated French protectorate of Morocco as the conference site, and on Symbol as the code name for the meeting. As it would be a parley to mull over military strategy, Roosevelt told Harriman to inform Churchill that the president wanted “no ringers” at the conference. That is, he wanted to exclude his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. This put Harriman in a delicate spot, for Churchill worked in harness with Anthony Eden. Harriman had to persuade Churchill to exclude Eden, not because Eden had nothing to add, but because Roosevelt sought to distance himself from Hull, who was “forceful, stubborn, and difficult to handle” and would likely prove “a nuisance at the conference.” Churchill reluctantly agreed to the decision. Hull, offended, complained to Harriman that the president was not keeping him informed. That was true; Franklin Roosevelt served as his own secretary of state. Yet the exclusion of Eden did not diminish Churchill’s enthusiasm for the meeting. He proposed to Roosevelt that they travel under the aliases Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but British officials thought the aliases were an invitation to the more cynical members of the press to term the venture quixotic. Churchill agreed, and cabled Roosevelt that in order to confuse the enemy, they should travel incognito “as Admiral Q and Mr. P…. We must mind our P’s and Q’s.” Although he agreed to leave Eden behind, he informed Harriman that he was bringing along “a couple of private secretaries,” his map room staff, and “one or two of the Joint Staff Secretariat.”28

  On Christmas Eve Eisenhower notified Roosevelt and Churchill that the winter rains had forced a shutdown of Tunisian operations for two months. The Germans had driven the British forward elements from the aptly named Longstop Hill, within sight of Tunis. Kesselring and Arn
im had won the race. Brooke told his diary: “I am afraid that Eisenhower as a general is hopeless. He submerges himself in politics and neglects his military duties, partly, I am afraid, because he knows little about military matters.” The words echo Brooke’s sentiments regarding Churchill, of whom he wrote, “Perhaps his most remarkable failing is that he can never see the whole strategical problem at once. His gaze always settles on some definite part of the canvas and the rest of the picture is lost.” Yet Brooke, as coolly logical as Stafford Cripps, failed as did Cripps to grasp the essential Churchill. Churchill had not learned his debating skills at an army staff college, where officers are trained to remove the emotional from strategic planning; nor had he learned his skills as a barrister at the bar. His education took place in the House of Commons, where knife fights were fought with words and the objective was to gut an opponent’s policy by gutting the opponent. After four decades of honing his skills in the House, Churchill could approach Brooke in no other manner but to cajole, belittle, and berate. In fact, Churchill, more intuitive than logical, possessed the painter’s gift for seeing myriad vistas, far and near. He scanned the entire canvas and when he came upon a scene of interest, he paused and pondered before moving on, never fast enough for Brooke. Thankfully for Brooke, Churchill manifested another trait. After arguing his case as if compromise were evil incarnate and the chiefs were too foolish to understand the perfect wisdom of his position, he acceded to their viewpoint if, that is, he had failed to bring them around to his. Brooke did not grasp that when it came to strategic thinking, Churchill could weigh the value of and consequences of several strategic solutions at once, military and political. It fell to Brooke to nudge him toward the most practical.29